The economy is holding its breath.

^^ a metaphor I can’t stop thinking about, from @nbashaw

— Kevin Simler (@KevinSimler) April 1, 2020

This is not a good metaphor. At all. A modern economy just does not work anything like respiration at any level. It’s not even remotely applicable. It is an example of the Paulian “not even wrong.”

The economy does not hold its breath. If you want to imagine it as something more static for comprehensibility, the economy is much more like a coffee cup on the edge of a counter. As long as you pour your coffee carefully, nothing goes wrong. But do a poor pour, and the coffee cup falls to the floor and shatters and the coffee spills everywhere.

After that, there is no credible way to reassemble the shattered cup and also no way to return all of the coffee to the cup. That state is lost forever. Entropy has intruded, and all at once. The relations between all those pieces cannot be completely re-established. The cup will likely never hold any beverage properly again. Perhaps a new cup can be re-assembled from the pieces, or if not they might be melted down and manufactured into another, much different cup or some other useful object. But it will not work or look the same no matter what, and it most likely will not function again at all.

And remember, the coffee cup is not a complex dynamic system like the economy. The outlook is even worse in that case, not better.